Improving the NESE Community

Question

Lately, there has been a splurge of not-so-positive posts on Meta -- some of it justified, some of it unjustified. Either way, they happened. And as always, the focus shouldn't be placed on what went wrong, but instead on what we can do to fix it.

This thread is intended to be a place where anyone can suggest methods or ideas to improve the community, and everyone can upvote/downvote on which ideas should be adopted or omitted.

The format I had in mind is every new idea/suggestion in its own answer, then the idea can be discussed in comments (or even in a new answer if you need to be more verbose).

If I'm way off about how much verbosity is needed for each idea, then maybe we abandon this thread and make each new suggestion its own Question. But lets start simple.

Answer 1

Suggestion: Make it rain with the votes

There are anywhere between 10-50 regular users on the site. I think it is safe to say that 100% of every thread / question / answer has been read by at least five people in the top 10-50 regular users on this site.

If we can convince these users to be incredibly generous with their voting, that would mean every question would have at least five votes (which would be a huge improvement from where we are now).

• If a question is something you never thought of, up vote it
• If a question is something you at one point in your career were curious about, up vote it
• If a question is something you think would help others in their career/journey, up vote it
• If a question shows effort and attention to formatting, up vote it

But it should also apply to answers to...

• If an answer adequately answers the original question(s), up vote it
• If an answer is well articulated and formatted and relavent, up vote it
• If an answer creatively answers the question from an angle you hadn't though of, up vote it
• If an answer adds anything positive to the discussion, up vote it

Related Meta Question

Remember, votes are like money you can give to other users. But this 'money' has no value if kept to yourself. It adds nothing to hold back your votes, and creates value when you do vote.

Answer 2

Suggestion: Only close Homework questions as a last resort. This is a suggestion wrapped around loosening the restrictions on homework questions.

• If the question shows good effort, answer it
• if the question is a request for clarification on a homework question, answer it
• If the question is conceptual, or something that could help many people coming here from search engines, answer it
• If the question is possibly homework, but not explicitly or obviously homework, answer it
  
  
• If the question is obviously a "do my work for me", then close and don't answer it.

Answer 3

Suggestion: Start every comment with a Hi or Hello.

This is just a general courtesy which costs very, very little, and goes a long way in creating a warmer community.

In particular, any time you comment on an answer/question and the original poster has less than 100 rep. We need to encourage the users to hopefully become regular users.

Answer 4

Suggestion: Every answer is a teaching opportunity

In my opnion, and compared to what I see in other Stack Exchanges, the quality of answers in NESE is inferior to some of the answers in the other Stack Exchanges.

The experienced engineers among us need to start viewing the questions being posed here not as simple "answer and move on", but as requests for a deeper understanding.

We need to start answering questions with more context, and more clarification, and looking at the bigger picture.

It is very rare for a question to have just a simple answer. Even in those cases, I think adding background explanation of "why" would go a long way.

• If your answer is one or two sentences long, really think about adding additional context
• If your answer is mostly quoting another reference, really consider rephrasing it in your own words in addition to the quoting. Users are often confused by the wording in official documentation, so simply quoting it does not really help
• If you can't see through the immediate question and into the specific lapse in knowledge that is inspiring the question than don't answer the question. This is a bit of a pet peeve, I've come across great questions with such low quality answers. Often the new user asking the question doesn't know any better, so simply accepts the first (more terse) answer and doesn't come back because in that interaction, NESE hasn't set itself apart from the plethora of other forums/help sites.

There is a measurable benefit to answering a question first. But if your answer isn't going to 'wow' the original asker, then don't answer it. If the question goes a few weeks without an answer, then feel free to add a terse answer. But every new, unanswered question should be regarded as a teaching opportunity.

Answer 5

Suggestion: Significantly loosen the restrictions on home networking questions.

There have been many questions on this site that are good network engineering questions, but have included the word "home network" or "at home" or something similar.

Often I see these questions voted to close or comments suggesting a needless reword. This doesn't add value to the community, and is a useless obstacle we're make new users go through to get a question answered.

• If a question is a good network engineering question, but mentions an application of a home network, then answer it
• If a question has potential application in an enterprise network, but is asked from the perspective of a home network, then answer it
• If a question shows good effort in figuring out a home networking issue, then answer it
  
  
• If a question lacks effort, or is clearly a non-network engineer or computer technician asking a somewhat unreasonable request, then close (politely) don't answer it.